Today is the 365th day of the year, so at the end, here is an update on my resolution progress.

Complete unfinished novel series. At the previous update, I reported finishing the all the series on the list and adding a few more series. These additions are also done.

Complete the first 25 of the BBC The Big Read Top 100 (from 2003).Pride & Prejudice, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre,Wind in the Willows, Catch-22, Gone With the Wind, Catcher in the Rye, Little Women, Corelli’s Mandolin, Birdsong, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca are all done. War and Peace is the only one on which I gave up finishing.

Attend more social events when invited. While I did not attend everything, I did attend more.

Goodreads: Read 50 books. Done with 55.

These were pretty much abandoned:

No more complaining about Blackboard, Inc. Because my employer entered a process to pick between Blackboard and its competitors, I really had to go quiet. It was not me the individual as me the serf.

Go away more. Early in the year, I just got in car and started driving. I ended up in the next state. There were a few more trips like this. Then there was the wedding of friends and a work trip. It was not specific enough, maybe? Perhaps I needed a list of places to go?

Treat everyone as a gentleman. Not because they are, but because you are. — Ed Sabol.

I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals. — Salvador Plascencia

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. — Woodrow Wilson

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. — Beverly Sills

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome. — Isaac Asimov

Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules. — Douglas Adams

It is remarkable how similar the pattern of love is to the pattern of insanity. — Merovingian, The Matrix Revolutions

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs, passed Oct 5, 2011

Tina Fey did for glasses what J.Lo did for asses. — Jon Stewart

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. — Mark Twain

We’re at our best when we’re placing important parts of ourselves into what we build. — rands, aka Michael Lopp

A mind dedicated to compassion is like an overflowing reservoir: it is a constant source of energy, determination, and goodness. You could compare compassion to a seed. If you cultivate it, it makes an abundance of other excellent qualities blossom, such as forgiveness, tolerance, inner strength, and confidence, allowing us to conquer fear and anxiety. The compassionate mind is like an elixir: it has the strength to turn adverse situations into beneficial circumstances. — The Dalai Lama

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation. — Walter Cronkite

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. — Arthur C. Clarke

How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. — Alfred De Musset

I understand the Swedish title translates into the The Men Who Hate Women. That is a more appropriate title. Though, I would imagine such a title would hurt sales in England and the USA. Each part has a statistic regarding violence against women in Sweden. I was not quite prepared for this. A very faithful to the book movie would be NC-17.

Reading the graphic violence made me feel sad. Also difficult is the intertwining of attraction and love with hurt and anger. The hero and heroine are tragic-ish. The villains are sadistic. No character has an easy to understand relationship with another. Everything is complicated by something. Well, okay not Vanger and his right hand man Frode. That was only simple boss and employee.

Salander is a goth, hacker, perceived sociopath. (She acts more sociopath than she is.) My adolescent reading was perhaps too much TSR novels about D&D settings. Women were strong. Salander evokes a toughness she would rip those other women apart.

I was at lunch last week when I saw pages about a failed monitoring checks on one of our sites. My coworkers were working on CE/Vista SP6 upgrades. Though it was one upgraded yesterday. When I returned to the office, I asked about it. Exactly 24 hours to the second after checking the license in yesterday’s final start, the JMS node failed a license check four times about a minute apart. On the fourth failure, it started a shutdown of the node. Others in the cluster did as well.

Fortunately, a coworker caught it soon enough to start them again so not enough were shut down the load balancer would stop sending us traffic. Also, this was between terms so we did not have a normal work load.

Still, JMS migrated. That made Weblogic edit the config.xml and probably left the cluster in a weird state. So I set cron to shutdown the cluster at 4am, copy a known good config.xml into place, check the config with our monitor script (pages if bad), and start the cluster. That was a disaster. Various nodes failed their early The startup started the admin node, but the JMS failed to start. So I was paged about it still being down when it ought to have been running.

My 6:30 am starts failed for the same reason: bad encrypted password in boot.properties. My only idea how to fix this was a coworker had mentioned having to re-install an admin node for a security error. So I called the coworker. I explained the problem and the solution I really did not want to take. She looked at the error and thought about it some. She decided it might work to replace the boot.properties with an unencrypted version because Weblogic would encrypted it when discovered. She also suggested removing the servers directory and placing a REFRESH file which would prompt the node to download a new copy of the files it needs from the admin node.

That worked to getting the nodes to start correctly. It was fine during the normal maintenance on Friday. Looks like we are in the clear.

That afternoon I brought it up on our normal check-in call with Blackboard. An unable to find license file issue was why Blackboard pulled CE/Vista SP4. It also was a Weblogic upgrade.

Humans make mistakes. Our clients’ administrators some times do very bad things without malicious intent. The “Deny Access” button is too close to the “Delete” one. About 160 student accounts were deleted.

The hypothesis came to me that sections keep data when a student is removed. Maybe it keeps the data when a student’s account is deleted. If I can trick the system into thinking the same student came back, then maybe it will relink the data. Everyone is happy.

To test this hypothesis, I…

Exported a copy of the grade book for my test student account in a test CE/Vista 8.0.6 system. Should the test go bad, then I could at least restore the grades.

Copied the account’s profile to a text file for the user name, sourcedid.source, and sourcedid.id.

Created a new account, gave it the same user name, sourcedid.source, and sourcedid.id (and first, last, password).

Enrolled the account into the original class as a student.

The grades were missing. Clearly my hypothesis was wrong. Data is not kept around for deleted students like it for unenrolled students. Which sucks.

In my retest, I…

Unrolled the same account. The grade book showed the student’s data in red, meaning the account was unenrolled but the data still there.

Deleted the same account. The grade book still showed the student’s data in red.

Created a new account with a 2 in the user name and added it to the section. The grade book showed the new account not the one I deleted.

I hope this means I still saw the data post-delete because of the cache services. Changing the enrollment changed what was stored in the cache so the old account disappeared at that point. A couple more tries confirms the behavior of the student appearing in the grade book post-delete.

Maybe this is why I do not work in sales. Maybe this is why I should never go into management.

Bragging about a potential customer selecting my product or service over another seems like a really stupid thing to do. The potential customer announcing the selection of something over another is okay to me. The provider smacks of arrogance. You were the least worst option. The fewest number of people hated your software. That is not something to brag about to everyone. It sounds bad to openly say the product was the least worst and plenty of users hate it, so it gets couched in terms that make it sound like the customer will work with the providers to improve it. Everyone should understand nothing is going to really improve. This is just empty platitudes so screwed people feel not so bad about it.

Maybe I need to stop following some corporate lackeys on social media so this kind of thing stops annoying me. Oh, wait, we do it too.